More Sales & Leads w/ Conversion Rate Optimization

We all want more leads and more sales, but how to do that without just paying more to Google or simply cranking up your advertising budgets. The solution is to get more for less (Or at least pay the same). This means to increase your conversion rates to get more out of your existing activities. In this email, I have put together the basic concepts of conversion rate optimization, and some additional concepts to get you started.Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a method to increase the percentage of users that convert into customers or perform a specific action. This means the conversion rate is the number of users vs. the actual goal completions. Conversion rate optimization focuses on continuously improving this percentage by making small tests, improvements, and changes to your digital platform.

Today, CRO is used for all sort of conversions such as e-commerce purchases, app sign-ups, lead generation or any other goal you may define.

The first step you have to take is to ensure that you can actually measure your conversion. Sounds obvious, but there is more to it.

The simplest form of measuring your conversion rate is to look at the traffic you get vs. the goal completions. This means if you get a 1000 visitors on your checkout page and only 10 make a purchase your conversion rate is 1%. Not that great.

To optimize the conversion, you cannot just drive more traffic to the checkout page as the conversion rate will most likely stay the same.

You have two options to increase the conversion rate (CR) properly:

1) Get better traffic; this means keep the 1000 visitors but make sure they are more willing to press the checkout button

2) Improve the checkout experience to get more people completing the processThe reason why I am giving you the two scenarios is that even if your checkout is perfect, but you are sending the wrong people to it, you will have a poor conversion rate, more to this in a bit. (And yes, you will not just do one of the two options, but both of them _�_�)

Lets focus on improving the experience for now!

To make your checkout better you could re-design the experience to make it easier to use and launch a new checkout page. You then may discover a higher conversion rate... or not.

Well that's precisely the point of conversion rate optimization as it is using a more scientific approach to tackle this challenge.

Instead of changing everything a CRO program will focus on improving small areas testing them measuring them and if there is an improvement; applying the change for good.

A/B testing and Multivariate testing

The most common technique used is A/B testing and Multivariate testing. A/B testing means to create two different version of the same page drive an equal amount of traffic to each version and see which one performs better.

Multivariate testing is similar but here multiple elements of the page are modified independently of each other which leads to many variations of the same page. (different headlines images call to actions etc.)

Tip: Google Optimize is a great tool to do this type of work.

Using this approach you can use different content placements call to actions and other influencing variations to see if they improve your conversion.

This method is also important when you create an entirely new version of an existing system or process. Imagine you are an e-commerce store and are launching a new checkout process. You don't want to replace your old checkout flow with the new one without making sure it works and converts.

There are two further approaches to A/B testing. One is to make changes based on best practices and see how they are impacting your results the second approach is to first research the behavior of users on your platform in more detail to understand where they are struggling dropping off or are abandoning the process.

There are a lot of debates on which approach to take but it depends a lot on your circumstances and requirements. A more analytic approach would be recommended if your systems are already performing well and you want to find additional ways to improve your conversion.

We now discussed how to improve the experience to increase your conversion but what about improving the traffic you receive as mentioned earlier. Because not only a better experience but also more relevant traffic can influence your conversion rate.

Improving your traffic is done by fully understanding your visitors and of course your target audience. By doing this you will technically repeat the same principles of optimizing the conversion but by looking at the previous stage (driving traffic). This means optimizing your ad placements keywords SEO campaigns email marketing etc.

This further leads to the conclusion that your conversion rate optimization does not only revolve around the improvement of a single page or step in the process but it requires you to examine the entire journey from A-Z. Each step a user takes from the initial landing on your website browsing selecting purchasing etc. plays a vital role while increasing your conversion rates.

That's why it is important to setup measurement points for each step along the conversion path and ensure that users proceed along this path as smoothly as possible.

If you have questions about conversion rate optimization and how it can help your business reply to this email and we will get back to you.

‍

Whether it's SEO or PPC services, Dubai-based agency, Prototype can help you today.